The TikTok Playbook for Food & Beverage Brands

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Hello, and thank you for joining. I am Melissa Travers, Director of Community here at BevNET and Nosh, and I am pleased to welcome you to the Nombase Podcast. Don't forget to check out nombase.com, BevNET's platform built for the CPG community.

It's where you can find episodes of this podcast and so much more. TikTok is both a cultural engine and a powerful commerce platform for brands. It's a place where discovery, community, and shopping all intersect.

It's where trends turn into sales, where creators drive conversation, and where brands of every size are finding new ways to connect with consumers. Joining me is Mike Westgate, Vertical Director of Food, Beverage, and Alcohol at TikTok.

Mike's been with TikTok for six years and has watched it evolve from a platform for entertainment into one that now drives real product discovery and purchase behavior.

We are going to get into what discovery commerce really means, what's working for food and beverage brands right now, and how TikTok is shaping the future of how people buy and find products. Mike, thanks so much for joining us from TikTok today.

Thank you, Melissa. I was really, really happy to be here and excited to chat a bit about TikTok and the very, very fast evolution.

Absolutely. I mean, we were just talking about how TikTok, I think, is one of the platforms that the folks have the most questions about. So this is going to be a really great opportunity to answer them.

And especially with you, so you've been with TikTok for six years, you've really seen the platform evolve.

How has TikTok changed as an opportunity for brands, both as a place for awareness and education, but also as a real shopping destination for CPG businesses?

I think it's a great question because it has evolved very quickly.

2:35

I think if you look back to the 2018-2019, the origins when I started in 2020, it was largely an awareness platform.

And if you remember some of the good old hashtag challenges, Jason Durulo dancing in his lawn, working with Scott's Lawn Care, it really was upper funnel focus. But very quickly, we instituted web ads and performance solutions.

And then we, over the last couple of years, have invested heavily in commerce too, because we saw that tremendous demand coming from the users and also coming from creators saying, hey, we want to represent products, but we don't want people to have

to go offline. So now you see TikTok really spans the full funnel. We are a discovery commerce platform that drives commerce everywhere.

And can you explain exactly what discovery commerce means?

Yeah, discovery commerce is something that we coined because it's very different than intent-based. Now we still have folks searching for recipes or products or ideas or travel tips online and finding opportunities to convert there.

But a lot of the time, folks come to TikTok for inspiration and entertainment. You know, so they're in their feed. They may see a unique way that a creator's positioned a product or a unique recipe or something like that.

And they either want to take action then. They could add to their cart within the TikTok experience. They could click out and go to a product detail page or another web experience.

Or it's top of mind now when they are going to retail.

So we really believe that because of the heavy influence by creators, the fully immersive, experiential nature of the experience on TikTok, it is a moment of discovery and inspiration that help people find new solutions for their needs.

And certainly not losing the consumer in between discovery and purchase is such a big deal. How long has TikTok been an opportunity for shopping as well as awareness?

Well, if you consider shopping to be off-site, driving to a retailer site could be driving to a.com, a DTC site. But TikTok Shop specifically was launched in 2023 and grown tremendously since.

It's actually a team that I worked on for a little while before I came back to the ads business. So really, we're about two years at it at this point.

Well, let's talk a little bit about what makes TikTok different from other social commerce platforms when it comes to helping food and beverage brands drive sales again. I mean, certainly we think of Meta, Facebook and Instagram, even Pinterest.

What makes TikTok different than some of the other platforms that we already know about?

We do inspire discovery. That's what people come to the platform for.

We give them a variety of options, whether that's taking action now, once again, driving off platform to a different site to learn more or to take an action by, or just inspire them to create their own solutions as well.

So we find that increasingly growingly, behaviors on the platform are people are searching now, too. So one in four users actually start a search in TikTok within the first 30 seconds of their session.

That's kind of the difference of how the behavior is happening, but we really consider ourselves an entertainment platform and our core, and we are a content graph.

So I think the difference between us and where, you know, maybe you see other social or entertainment players, is there, you know, a network graph? It's what you're going to see is based upon your friends and your contacts.

Here, what you see on TikTok is based upon your interests.

You know, there are a lot of opportunities that we cover on The Nombase Podcast that are especially appealing for younger stage brands, more emerging brands, because they're newer to market, and therefore folks who are willing to jump in and just

figure things out have an opportunity to compete with some of the larger brands who have much bigger budgets and much bigger teams. So for those early stage brands that might not have a big team or a big budget, what is the lowest lift way or some of

We have invested heavily in automation and first party platform tools to enable brands to activate quickly.

6:31

We have a vast community of creators that are very enthusiastic. They understand the content style. They understand effects.

They understand speaking to their audience. So tapping into the creator community is a very low lift way to get involved and to build up a content backlog to showcase your brand in unique ways.

So I think if you're coming to the platform and you're testing it out as a new brand, come in with a test and learn mindset, try a few things out, but be consistent with how you participate.

Lean into creators, lean into those that have a voice of authority, and then use the tools that we have. We have a lot of remix tools.

So if you have one or two assets that you've tried on another social platform, use one of the remix tools that we have in a tool called Symfony that will help you remix that into several different versions.

You can add avatars, you can change language, and it helps to make it really, really fit for platform.

Is Symfony something that you just find right on the platform? Where do you find something like Symfony?

Yeah, you can find it within our TikTok One platform, which is an all-in-one creative solution. That includes ways to connect with creators. You can connect with agencies that manage creators and help you build content.

You could work directly with creators on challenges and missions to help build content around your brand.

You can use our video editing tools in Symfony within that platform that help you once again either create that new or remix assets that you already have.

When you were talking a little bit about how earlier stage brands can get involved, you said test out different kinds of content. How do you categorize those different kinds of content? Like, how do you think about different kinds of content?

Yeah, that's a great question and an evolving answer.

As we know that there's 170 million monthly users on TikTok engaging for hours each day, and scrolling, participating, engaging, producing their own content as well. So there's no one size fits all. There's not even a silver bullet.

But we do like to coach our brands and our brand partners on creating a healthy creative mix, which includes a few different elements. The first is professionally generated content.

So just imagine if you shot something in a studio or something that was edited, you know, as post-roll or something you might actually have done for a 30-second commercial. That's what we call PGC, professionally generated content.

There's UGC as well. So there's organic users on the content producing, content about your brands or competitors, creators fall into that bucket as well.

And then the third bucket, which is emerging, which we're enabling now through Symphony and other tools, is AIGC.

So how do you take the best of the first two and actually use remixing tools to produce different versions, different languages, different avatars, and meet that threshold for content needs to be able to cut through the feed and reach your audience?

How long has the AI component been available to people?

Well, it's been available for at least a year. We've rolled it out across several tools. We now have AI and automation built into what we call Smart Plus.

That's an ad placement, automation, and optimization tool. So Smart Plus, once again, back to your earlier question about how could you get started in a low lift way? It's to use the automated ad tools.

It helps with targeting. It helps with ad groups and creative placement, helps with budgeting. So it's kind of a hands-off way to optimize your presence and reach on TikTok.

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You know, we've certainly talked about social media plenty of times with the founders and brands in our audience. And one of the things that keeps coming up is I just don't have time. I'm one person, and I have to do all of these.

You know, I have to perform all of these different roles, and to spend that amount of time creating content and then posting it on platforms like TikTok is so much work.

So I think, you know, that's certainly a really helpful thing for folks to know about. So you don't get dinged for, you know, repurposing content, for regenerating content using the AI tool. There's no, there are no penalties for that.

No, no, no, no.

In fact, there's, I mean, we wouldn't build it into the tool or give you the solutions and capabilities if you'd get dinged for it.

It's actually, I think it's a great way to create more inspirational ways to convey your brand, to use the creative tools and edits and transitions and avatars, even sounds, which is, you know, that's at our core.

We are a sound on platform to use music and creative ways to once again inspire the audience, to help to discover your product and then take an action.

All right.

11:25

Now I think we're getting into some of the really fascinating details of TikTok. And I, you know, I know that we're not necessarily going to give away to all of TikTok's algorithmic secrets here.

But what are some of those key creative factors that can help folks on TikTok who are posting on TikTok, you know, kind of rise to the top?

Are there any creative factors that brands should keep in mind like whether it's posting verbiage and style, the methods they're using, the content mix?

Are there any tips that you can share with the audience that will help them put their best foot forward?

We have plenty of basics on posting styles and how to either add touch ups to your video, to use transitions in music and so forth. So there's some basics there. But once again, no silver bullet.

It has to make sense for the audience, has to make sense for the brand. But 15 seconds sound on, use music, use transitions, avatars if it makes sense, stickers.

And then definitely voiceover can be a compelling thing depending upon the story you're trying to tell.

So I would say more generally speaking, when you're in the remixing tools and the video production tools, take full advantage of what's available to you and try different things that make sense for you.

The easier answer, and I'll probably be a broken record on this today, is to work with creators because they do this for a living. They understand the platform.

They are the most creative people in the world, and they understand how to reach your audience likely better than you do. So I like to call them very respectfully your second sales force.

If you can find those folks that have a passion for your brand, that truly understand your audience or the audience you're trying to reach, they'll translate your value prop in ways you probably haven't imagined yet.

Are there any numbers around posting frequency that folks should know about in order to have a meaningful presence on TikTok?

At least twice a week. I think getting to a healthy one time a week or 7 to 10 videos a week is a good aspiration.

But you can add multitudes to that number once again by working with creators and having that kind of amplifier effect on what you're already doing.

So once get back to your common concern is, oh, if I launch on TikTok, I've got this list of things that I've got to do now.

I have to create content, I have to create campaigns, I have to manage the ads, I have to target and set budgets and so forth. A lot of that can be done with automation. A lot of that can be done once again with working with the right creators.

What about hashtags?

I always see the hashtags and I wonder, are hashtags working? Do they do anything?

Well, yeah, if I'll go back to one in four users starting a search within the first 30 seconds of their session, hashtags is one of the primary ways that they find your content or content surrounding the topic that you're targeting.

So hashtags are a great way to permeate the feed, to add tags and signals to the content you're creating to help users find you.

And is TikTok similar to other social platforms where the more you engage, the more you react to other people's posts, the more you like them, the more you share them, the more visibility you yourself have?

Yeah, so think about what we call a content graph. The content graph is always taking signals from users and from brands and from creators as to what is engaging and potentially viral and interesting.

So if you hover over a video, watch for more than three, five, six seconds. If you comment, if you share, these are all signals that this is interesting content within a specific category that they'll serve the user more of.

How about storytelling approaches? I feel like initially I understood that TikTok really responds well to sort of the behind-the-scenes, maybe not so polished content. Is that still the case?

What sorts of storytelling approaches are working right now?

Well, I think it's back to the answer on creative mix. I don't think that we could sit in a closed room and write a full narrative or a PR brief and say, this is our brand story.

It has to come from different angles, because once again, 170 million people on the platform every month. There's a lot of different perspectives and interests and ways of translation, ways of consuming.

So I think having multiple angles to the story that is either a bit more formal and polished back to the PGC we talked about. It could be more in the moment, responding to trends, participating. It could be in the comment section.

It could be once again with sponsoring and featuring specific creators that make the most sense for your brand for a specific campaign.

So I wouldn't say that to tell the story from one voice or one angle, I would invite a variety and then track and measure what works and lean into that.

Pretty soon.

16:09

It's going to be 2026. The holidays are right upon us. What are some creative ways that food and beverage brands can use TikTok to spark engagement and drive sales during this part of the season where really sales are the name of the game?

You can take it very literally and look at food and recipes.

What's trending on TikTok right now heading into entertainment season and holiday season is food and recipes. But what about adjacent to that?

So there's gift giving, there's entertaining and party hosting, there's favors and gifts and games, there's decorations.

So anything in that adjacent space of thinking about the seasonal moments and how to organically attach your brand to that conversation, there's so much creative things happening out there right now.

I just did a search this morning around holiday items and there was some really cool stuff on how to decorate your kitchen. And then of course, if you're decorating your kitchen, what are you eating and drinking? You need to do it.

You'll find a lot of cool drink recipes happening right now.

So I think expanding the aperture a bit around what the holiday means to the consumer and then attaching your brand in organic and relevant ways to those different topics will help expand your audience as well.

Gotcha. All right. So you already referenced Symfony.

So let's talk a little bit about live shopping. How do brands use a tool like live shopping to produce content efficiently and then still feel authentic?

Well, specific to food and beverage, I think it could be a very, very compelling format that users are really starting to light up to now and tune in and sometimes take an action.

Whether it's a TikTok or buying something they saw or they engaged with during the live. But that's the best way to illustrate a full sensory experience around a product. So you could do drink recipes and mixology.

You could obviously do baking and cooking. You could do gift wrapping. You could do decorating.

Live is a great way to engage an audience and break that fourth wall.

Some of the best live hosts, as you'll see either on the commerce side of the business or even those just running kind of general lives and users, they really spend time in an efficient mix of presenting products, solutions, inspiring the audience,

Where would a brand go to set up a live shopping event?

Well, you'd have to have a TikTok shop, and you'd have to have products available on the list.

You'd have to have inventory and so forth. And then either you could run the live yourself. You could work with what we call a TikTok shop partner to help host and produce that for you.

Probably the best, fastest, low-lift path would be working with our affiliate network.

So within TikTok shop, we have a vast and growing network of affiliate marketers that will work based upon commission of sales that they can enact through their content, through live, through just short videos, and appending a product link to that.

So first of all, set up the TikTok shop. Second of all, look at content opportunities and producing shoppable content with product anchors.

Work with our affiliate network to engage with creators that want to represent your products, and then test out some of the different formats like live.

And then what does the viewer see on their end during a live shopping event?

Well, they'll see, it's just like in the feed. So it'll be yet another seemingly video that's happening in real time.

You'll see that it's annotated live, and you can click into that to go full screen immersion, comment, add emojis to it, actually take an action if there's a product link and add something to your cart within TikTok shop.

So that's how you would see it. But it doesn't feel like a separate destination. You don't have to go, you could go into our live tab, or it could just show up as something that was sponsored, featured, or showed up organically in your feed.

All right, this is one of my favorite questions to ask people like you.

20:04

You see so many brands come across your desk, you see so much. What are some of the most exciting food and beverage trends you're seeing emerge on TikTok right now?

Well, I mentioned a few of them because they're adjacent to food and beverage. Dubai Chocolate was one that came out a couple of years ago. I love that story because it started from one creator in Dubai, and then picked up steam of just an interest.

What is Dubai Chocolate? Why? Pistachio was attached to that as well, hit tons and tons of views with the hashtag.

And then big brands took notice, and Lint produced their own skew of Dubai Chocolate, and their stock price went up.

And now you cannot go through checkout line and Trader Joe's or Randall's or H-E-B here in Texas, Kroger, Walmart, you name it, without at the point of purchase in the checkout line, you're gonna see some Dubai Chocolate bars or some sort of flavor

there. So that was pretty cool. There's been a lot of in our past examples of a creator produces a unique recipe around somebody or around something, Logan with cucumbers.

There was almost a cucumber shortage because he was the cucumber salad guy, and he was so engaging, almost like an ASMR voice.

And the things that the recipes he was producing, the way he was presenting and engaging with the audience just made it so compelling. If you remember a few years back, we had the ocean spray moment too.

So that was, I love this, you know, kind of life turns lemons into lemonade. A guy's car broke down.

So instead of, you know, grabbing a cab or something, he jumped on his longboard and for some reason had a bottle of ocean spray, and decided to videotape himself in first person, lip-syncing to Dreams by Fleetwood Mac.

And I think it was the right place, right time. We all wanted to get out of our homes. It was during COVID, ocean spray sold out.

Dreams went to number one. This guy became a paid creator, featured in all kinds of different brand ads moving there forward, because it became such a relatable, exciting, inspiring, positive experience that people could do their own version of.

So then I saw videos of people skateboarding, pouring like pumpkin spice lattes on top of a pumpkin on there. I mean, it was crazy, but it was fun, right?

The things all of those have in common is that they feel very authentic. Like it never felt like anyone was trying to sell anything. It's just something that everybody wanted to be a part of.

Those are great examples.

Yeah.

I would love to hear some other examples from smaller, more nibble brands, like certainly the Mars or the Kraft Heinz brands. They've done very well and have had some very successful campaigns.

But you also shared some really amazing examples from brands like Bloom, Goli, Kin. What are some of those examples that can show our audience how some of the more emerging brands are using TikTok to move their businesses forward?

Yeah. And I think those are a couple of great examples. I'll add to that Javi Coffee and Lucky Energy are doing some very exciting things, both in retail and TikTok shop as well.

And then just general advertising and organic growth on the platform. But I think the common thread for all of them is leaning in very heavily to develop that second sales force of creators and ambassadors.

Bloom was largely started taking off, I think, on other platforms, and then leaned into the creative style on TikTok. They're a founder-led, influencer-led brand.

And they found that having a set of advocates representing the brand to provide that three-dimensional value prop, ways of using the product, helped them expand into other categories.

And also having the credibility of reaching new audiences on TikTok and becoming a viral product, they were able to expand into retail as well.

So kind of creating a growth engine or a spillover effect, a rising tide within TikTok to expand the omni-channel.

So like I said, if there's any one common thread for goalie, can, bloom, javvy coffee, lucky energy, it is working heavily with creators to produce high quality, high quantity content that cuts through the feed.

You said that the comment section in TikTok is the new focus group. How can brands use this almost as a feedback loop, you know, that functions as like a real time focus group to help guide product or marketing decisions?

Well, I'll use a couple of examples from my adjacent category in dining. Taco Bell actually brought back their nacho fries because people were demanding it. Like, where did these things go?

People, there was such fandom around it that they didn't know this limited time offer had to come back. So now they keep looking into the comment section. Once again, is that always on focus group?

What are we learning? What needs are we not serving? What have we introduced in the past that might have some nostalgia attached to it that we could revisit?

Jimmy John's did the same thing, one of my favorites, the Kickin Ranch. But they didn't just bring it back based upon demand. They actually paired that with a pop punk anthem.

So it became this whole relaunch moment and now a staple on their menu. So those are a couple of examples of how brands, if they're just listening and leaning in, can find innovation. It's basically an R&D channel for them.

So we've talked a little bit about the ad potential and ad options.

How should brands think about balancing organic storytelling with some of that paid media to make sure they're getting the most out of the platform?

Well, I think it's important to have that as yet another lever of storytelling that is based upon the brand's either seasonal, annual, product-based narrative that they can then use to, as we call, spark.

25:31

So whether it's in between campaigns, promotion, product launch, the common drug beat for a brand that they can then turn organic content, if something is trending or showing illustrating virality or high engagement metrics, they could actually throw

paid media behind it. They can do that with creator content as well. So we have a tool called Content Suite that lives within TikTok one, as I mentioned before. Content Suite is an always on kind of listening plus potential paid media tool.

So just imagine if you're one of the brands that I mentioned before, they have a brand profile app mention hashtag set that they could input that creates a profile and a listening tool for them to spot when content starts trending about their brand.

And within one click, they can reach out to the creator or user, ask for the rights to use it as an ad.

So maybe we could have called it lightning in a bottle, but it's really being on top of trending viral emerging content, and using that as yet another paid media vehicle.

Okay, so let's say that I'm a brand and I noticed that some content that I've posted is trending. How would you suggest that I used paid media to support that?

What we call within the ads manager is Spark. So you can basically select that as an ad creative within a campaign and throw money specifically behind that asset if you're seeing it perform well.

Otherwise, what I mentioned before, you can let Smart Plus do that for you.

So Smart Plus is the automated optimization tool within our ads manager to identify creatives that are emerging and performing better and throw more weight behind that in terms of budget that ideally will help escalate the ROAS and performance of the

And so is putting marketing dollars behind that, is it basically just boosting the post?

Yeah, essentially.

What we call it sparking, yeah.

Sparking, okay, okay, that makes perfect sense. All right, so we've talked so much about TikTok, about how brands can use it to sell product and to create awareness for their brands and everything they're doing. What's next?

I feel like TikTok is evolving week by week. What is upcoming for TikTok? You had mentioned an Instacart partnership, but tell us everything we should be on the lookout for as we're quickly approaching 2026.

Thanks for mentioning that, because that's something I'm super excited about.

I think there is a misnomer in the past that if you didn't have a D2C, or you didn't want to sell a TikTok shop, you get a stop mid-funnel with TikTok, because it's basically awareness and then hope that they show up at retail.

We're trying to give the full-funnel solution to brands, and then also users, once again, they're inspired in a moment of seeing a product they really want. Why not add it to your cart?

So we're very excited that we just announced last week at Adweek, the Instacart partnership, which allows brands the access to localized inventory and catalog for the Instacart carried items that connects to the retailer in that particular region.

And then they can also access the audiences too and find lookalikes. So ideally, your targeting gets smarter and smarter and smarter based upon the actions taken by the audience.

And full-funnel solution for anything that's off the shelf that may not have a DTC in the food and bev space.

So are you saying that I'll be able to go on TikTok by whatever it is? It could be Bloom or some Kin. Order it on TikTok via Instacart and have it delivered to my house?

Correct.

That's crazy.

And the Bloom example, you actually could order on TikTok shop right now. And that would be delivered through their DTC engine.

But yeah, this Instacart really expands the consideration set of the products that you might traditionally find at retail that don't have a DTC capability, that now you can add it to your cart and have it at your door.

I mean, for our audience, that is a huge piece of news. So very, very exciting.

Finally, for the emerging and early stage founders out there, if you could give them one piece of advice about building their businesses through TikTok, what would that be?

See, don't wait. I think TikTok is large. It's very well established, but we're still only a few years old, and there's still early mover advantages.

There's still audiences to be found. There's still communities to develop within. There's still new creators that want to test things and may have a passion for your product.

So think in a TikTok first mindset, how can I work with creators that best understand the platform, that have a passion for my brand, that will create moments of discovery and inspiration, and then test out all the tools that we offer.

So I mentioned a few of them. We have video editing tools. We have Smart Plus automation and optimization tools within the ads platform.

Test out an organic voice, and then see how your audience moves across channel to drive retail sales.

Mike Westgate, Vertical Director of Food, Beverage, and Alcohol at TikTok. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Nombase Podcast. That was super educational.

I think we all learned so much. For everybody else out there listening, thank you for joining the Nombase Podcast, and we'll see you next time.

Thanks, Melissa.

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